DailyDirt: Sharing Our Microbes

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The human body harbors many more microbial cells than human cells. There are at least 10,000 different types of organisms on (and in) a healthy person, and finding out how our bodies interact with these microbes could help us understand how diseases are transmitted (or perhaps created). It's a huge task to study trillions of cells, so some microbiome projects are turning to crowdfunding and citizen scientists to help out. Here are just a few interesting links on the nascent field of mapping our microbial friends.

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NASA has been sending microbes to the moon and mars!

The equipment to detect ever smaller amounts of living material has found that NASA's "clean rooms" aren't so sterile -- and we've been sending all kinds of life to the moon and mars. (And also on Voyager I & II...)